Japanese voters pick Koizumi's party

TOKYO -- Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ruling party snapped up all three parliamentary seats in by-elections Sunday, marking a solid victory for the leader in the first electoral test since a hostage crisis cast a shadow over Japan's role in Iraq.\nThe voting for three vacancies in the 480-seat lower house of Parliament was considered a preview of a major electoral battle looming in July in the legislature's upper chamber.\nFinal results posted on local election board Web sites showed Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party handily won two of the three seats up for grabs.\nHis party also secured the third, according to early results and exit polls. The candidate, Minoru Terada, was already celebrating with supporters amid victory cries of "banzai" in footage shown by public broadcaster NHK late Sunday.\nThe wins boost the LDP's number of lower house seats to 245 and its already comfortable coalition majority to 279.\nSunday's outcome backed expectations that Koizumi's party got a big boost from his handling of a hostage crisis in Iraq earlier this month.\nFive Japanese civilians who were among more than 40 foreigners taken captive in the violence-plagued nation were released unharmed after mediation by Islamic clerics.\nThe crisis posed a dramatic challenge to Koizumi's support for the U.S.-led coalition: Islamic militants who kidnapped three of the Japanese captives threatened to burn them to death unless Japan withdrew a contingent of 500 troops on a humanitarian mission to help with reconstruction in Iraq.\nKoizumi refused to bow to their demands, and polls after the hostages came home safely showed as many as two-thirds of voters approved of how he handled the crisis, even though the country is split over whether its troops should be in Iraq.\nOpposition parties say deploying Japan's military to a de facto war zone was reckless and violates the nation's pacifist constitution.\nAll three by-elections Sunday pitted candidates from the ruling party against its main rival, the Democratic Party, and Japan's tiny communist party. The outcome helped the LDP regain ground lost to the centrist Democrats in general elections last November, when frustrated voters rewarded the opposition party with impressive gains.